Maggie Noodles: The Terrible World of Culture Concessions
It’s 10:30 at night and I’m brushing my teeth, leaning over the sink in my bathroom with toothpaste foaming gently around my mouth. My mind is wandering as I’m listening to the hum of the bathroom fan and the scraping sounds of plastic bristle against white teeth, and I’m thinking about my brushing technique. I’m thinking about how the dentist always tells me I have great gum health even though my parents are always yelling at me that I don’t brush my teeth properly. I giggle to myself as I think back to a day in – kindergarten, it probably was, or maybe 1st grade – when the school brought in a dental hygienist to our classroom to teach us about oral health. I don’t remember too much about him or that day, honestly speaking, but I remember that he was the father of one of our classmates, and he had brought with him an oversized set of plastic, pearly-white jaws and a giant, flat toothbrush.
I remember how, one by one, we went out into the common quad space outside our classroom to consult with this dentist person about proper brushing technique. The quad space was shared by 4 teachers and was purple-blue-orange-themed like the rest of our school, and we used the space only on special occasions and sometimes on I-don’t-wanna-go-outside-for-recess occasions. I remember this space quite vividly, with a lot of foundational childhood memories taking place there – one of which was this brushing technique talk.
When it was my turn, I sat down at a table in front of the big teeth, intrigued by this new, unique toy. The dentist guy handed me the mega-sized toothbrush and asked me to brush the set of teeth in front of me like I brush my own teeth at home. I relished the challenge and went at it with full strength, scrubbing scrubbing scrubbing. The guy, when I think back on it now, was probably amused to see a tiny Indian girl using every ounce of brute strength she had to scrub those heavy plastic teeth, but instead of laughing at me, he told me that I was doing a great job. He didn’t say, “Hey kid, maybe don’t scrub your own teeth that hard at home, okay? That’s gonna hurt.” No, I learned that lesson the hard way on my own later that night.
For the dentist guy, it was a moment of pure adult escapism, a harmless choice not to engage in a pointless conversation with a child that would result in awkward explanations or mental overexertion. Back in my bathroom, leaning over the sink and brushing my adult teeth, I’m smiling to myself at this memory. How many times have I done the same thing, how many times have I chosen not to engage with a child over a conversation that I’ve determined is above their pay-grade?
But as I’m smiling about this and excusing my own escapist behavior, another memory from my childhood comes to mind, one of a more harmful form of adult escapism that led me down a dark path of struggling with my identity for years to come.
This memory takes place in the same purple-blue-orange-themed quad at around the same time, sitting at the same table. It’s funny – this dissolvable quality of childhood memories, the way the sloppily-drawn boundaries around them blend together into an amorphous mess of emotions and unclear images. This memory in particular is fuzzier; I don’t quite remember all the details because I’ve kept it shelved away for such a long time. It has resurfaced so suddenly, tinged at the edges with a blueness that I now understand to be a marker of melancholy.
There’s no start to the memory and there’s no context to it because I can’t remember why we were there or what was happening, but all of the kids were being interviewed again, one by one. Maybe it was one of those mother’s day present things that elementary schools did, where they asked the kids questions in mad-lib style and then presented their parents with some fill-in-the-blank piece of artwork. I don’t really remember. But I do remember that the white lady I was with had asked me a question, “What’s your favorite food?”
I knew the answer to that question right away. Maggi. I loved Maggi.
It was one of my mom’s favorite foods too. We loved eating it together – right after swimming classes or as an after-school snack while I watched Tom and Jerry cartoons on half days. Some of my favorite childhood memories contain happy smiles and silly moments shared over bowls of Maggi noodles. The packet of masala in the package added the most delectable flavors, the perfect balance of just-a-little-bit-too spicy for tiny 6-year old me. I squirted an obscene amount of Heinz ketchup on it, probably a trick I learned from my mom to make the Maggi less spicy. Even now, Maggi is a special food that I save for the most special circumstances, like to celebrate finishing up an exam at college or as a mid-night snack when it feels like the day has been almost perfect and just needs one finishing touch to set it in the history books as a Good Day. It’s something that South Asian kids of my generation can undoubtedly always bond over – a staple in so many of our lives as common as drinking milk growing up.
But unfortunately, people outside of the South Asian community can’t really relate; they don’t know what Maggi noodles are – or at least, 15 years ago, they didn’t really know what they were. This poor white lady, who was tasked with filling in the blanks on my sheet for me, was so confused when she heard my answer. I had said, “Maggi,” in that dazed way that kids do when they start drooling over their favorite foods, fully anticipating her looping script to spell out M-A-G-G-I on the sheet in front of me.
But instead, she looked confused. “What was that, hon?”
She had me repeat myself, thinking she was mishearing me. Still not understanding, she had me describe the dish to her. Being so young and inexperienced in the world of cross-cultural cuisine navigation, I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain to her that Maggi is a South Asian brand of instant noodles, similar to microwavable Ramen. Instead, I did the best a 5-year old could do, and my description only confused her further.
At first, I remember being incredulous about it; how could she not know what I was talking about? Everyone had had Maggi before. Right? As our conversation progressed though, it started to dawn on me that this wasn’t an everyone thing, this was a me thing. As a child, I didn’t understand that this set of “me things” came from my Indian culture and that I didn’t necessarily share that with the other kids at my school. I didn’t have the comprehension then of what it meant to be Indian. Truth be told, I’m still figuring out what this really means, but back then, I was absolutely clueless that it was even a distinction to be made. I didn’t know that there were boundaries to be drawn around my identities. So, trying to explain to this woman what my favorite food was without any comprehension of the greater forces of identity at play quickly became a more difficult task than either of us had bargained for.
Eventually, we started to get fed up with each other. My sense of other-ness was starting to become uncomfortable for the both of us – until she said, “Oh I know, you’re talking about Maggie Moo ice cream. Is that it, honey?” I remember this moment so clearly – I wanted to fight it, to say, “No of course not, it isn’t anything like ice cream.” But somehow, in that moment, I knew it wasn’t worth it. I chose instead to concede the battle.
“Yeah, that’s what I meant, Maggie ice cream,” I said while looking down in my lap. I watched her write it on the paper, in the blank next to “My favorite food is...” and when I looked up at her again, I noticed a look of satisfaction – or maybe relief – on her face, the tell-tale look that adults get when they’ve successfully escaped difficult conversations with unsuspecting children.
When I think back on this memory now, I realize that it’s one of the earliest I have of my realizations that I was different from the other kids in school. What that moment of adult escapism ultimately taught my younger, identity-developing self was that my “other-ness” and the things that made me different from the other kids were things that I needed to hide, to push under a rug and not talk about whenever I could avoid it. Because that woman refused to engage with me and understand this aspect of my life and because she chose instead to assimilate my answer into something more mainstream and American, she taught me how I needed to “fit in” by being less Indian.
That moment from my young, elementary school days became the first in a long line of cultural concessions that I have made over the years in an attempt to assimilate myself into mainstream American culture. I wrote about one of these moments in October 31st where I told the story of an elementary school Halloween where I dressed as Jodha from Jodha Akbar but was identified by adults as a gypsy instead, and where I eventually gave into the phrase, accepting the concession I was making of my individuality for something more palatable in mainstream culture.
I spent years folding under these microaggressions, making similar concessions of my identity – trading in pieces of my Indian culture for more acceptable, mainstream American culture – as forced to by pure ignorance and the refusal of diversity in my hometown. It led to the all-too familiar formation of my double-agent life; Indian at home and American at school.
You see, for kids of my background who have grown up Indian in America in the early 2000s – and for the thousands who came before us, starting with the first Sikhs who arrived in the Imperial Valley – our stories have been tied to game of cultural assimilation, making ourselves as un-Indian and as very-American as we can possibly be. We’ve become experts at trading Bollywood for Hollywood, Indian dance for hip hop and ballet, kadhi-chawal for pizza and hot dogs. We play this game simply because we must in order to fit in, to not be an odd out-cast at school or in neighborhood social circles. When a society tells you that the reason you are alone and considered weird is because your Indian identity makes you different, you learn very quickly to be as un-Indian as possible.
The trouble was, however, that the more I tried to adopt this American culture, the more I found I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t self-identify with mainstream American cultural icons; I just didn’t like these things as much as my other friends did. This tension lasted until the end of middle school, where I arrived at my high school wholly stripped of the Indian-half of myself and heartily lost in the American culture I was meant to adopt, until I had no proper identity with which to claim my space in the world. In trying to fit in more, I had essentially lost all sense of my identity.
Until… I was 15 and in high school and, all of a sudden, it was cool to be Indian again. Having a heritage was something exceptional and interesting. In typical Western-Orientalist fashion, my high school suddenly became obsessed with other cultures and used tokenism as a proxy to “diversity and inclusion” to allow for cultural appropriation.
Henna became a Thing at my school, and the girls’ sports teams would have henna parties as a form of bonding. We had diversity assemblies and world food days where the Indian dance and spicy biryani became a hit. Around the world too, celebrities started appropriating Indian attire so that maang tikas and bindis became cool, and musicians started using Indian musical scales and ragas in their pop songs. All around me, my white friends were being more Indian than I was. As infuriating as the irony was, I ended up leaning into it too, thinking that what I had so suddenly stumbled across was an acceptance of the hidden second-half of my identity.
I started being braver and wearing kurtis to school on special occasions. I choreo-ed Indian dances for the Diversity assembly. I slowly started to reconcile more parts of myself into one magnificent whole that I didn’t have to put away at school. It was liberating.
A snapshot of the Indian dance group at my senior year diversity assembly
And yet, the entire time, it was also very clear to me that I was only testing the waters and asking for permission from the privileged members of society to determine what was now acceptable for me to do as a minority. I wasn’t “being Indian” in the truest sense of being myself, but rather, I was being Indian to share my culture with my friends. Sharing meant that I was putting those parts of my culture in their hands, releasing ownership of it and allowing it to pass into the realm of the American melting pot. It was a process taking place on a stage much larger than my small high school and was dictated by the Orientalist ideals of the dominant, white narrative. Collectively, the South Asian community chose to indulge that fantasy, sharing the food and the colors and the music but keeping the oppressive classism, racism, and sexism, to itself.
Slowly, it became apparent to me that “being Indian” was like a card you could play to receive special attention, to show that you were diverse, different, or cultured. It was a “fun fact” about you, like something to share as an ice-breaker, like an identity that I learned to turn on when advantageous to me – or, more accurately, to turn off when disadvantageous. It truly felt like self-inflicted tokenism in the most twisted sense of the word, like this piece of my identity was a tool to leverage for my own personal gain. Naturally, it became an area of deep contention for me – something I didn’t fully understand how to navigate and whether it was morally justified or not. When does it become repugnant for you to use pieces of yourself as social currency? When does the instant gratification of acceptance in these circles become not so gratifying anymore? At what point did I go too far?
But even beyond this constant internal moral quandary, my Indian identity becomes a minefield of trial-error situations to navigate in the professional sphere. Although I want to feel comfortable bringing my full self to work or school, I often feel as though I can’t immediately, and that instead, I have to test the waters to see what parts of myself and my Indian identity are allowed at the table. It forces me to ask difficult questions, like is this part of me just here for tokenism and so that we can check the box of diversity or am I here to actually draw from my experiences as an Indian American?
Answering this question starts with a scan of the room, noting who’s there that looks like me and who isn’t. As a minority, you become exceedingly talented at this quick room scan and at identifying whether this is a place to keep testing waters or to assimilate as much as you can. If I figure that diversity is “celebrated” here, I step a little further out into the water and perhaps make a reference to something from my identity during an ice breaker. If it’s received well, the process continues until I feel as though I am accepted entirely, as an Indian American woman. But if it doesn’t land, it feels in that moment like my voice has been silenced because I’ve been implicitly told to quiet this part of myself.
Imagine this moment that I shared with the Dean and Associate Dean from the Ross School of Business not too long ago. Sitting in a lunch with them and a handful of specifically diverse students a few days before our midterm exams were to take place, we were asked to share in an icebreaker what our favorite comfort food was. Given the space I was in, I felt comfortable enough to share that a favorite of mine, something that I’m especially craving during this grueling midterm season, is chola bhature. I described the chickpea gravy dish with all of its fried bread deliciousness, my mouth watering over the decadence I could just picture in my mind, but where I had expected to be met with affirming nods and looks of interest, I found instead more or less blank stares looking back at me until we moved on to the next person. Perhaps it’s a personal affliction, but not receiving any affirmation of this unique thing I had just shared in that moment served to signal to me that my Indian voice might not be welcome in this space.
This isn’t new, of course – these are waves I’ve become quite adept at surfing – but in that moment, it was jarring to me to feel my voice silenced in a place that was said to hold diversity and inclusion as a core value. It served to silence, in effect, the rest of my voice as well. I found myself uncomfortable speaking up at all during the rest of the meeting, feeling like I needed to choose my words carefully and, at times, feeling like I shouldn’t really speak at all in this conversation about diversity and equity at Ross. By failing to do something as simple as affirming or even nodding with interest at what I had to share during the icebreaker, the deans and the rest of the students in that room not only silenced that identity of mine, but in effect, silenced the rest of my entire voice with it.
This is what happens when we don’t strive to create environments that welcome people and ask them to bring their full selves to work. This is what happens when we have a broken culture that doesn’t serve to uplift and affirm our diverse identities, whatever they may be. This is what happens when we engage in adult escapism with those of differing identities from us, and what happens when we essentially dictate which identities are allowed in a space and which aren’t. By silencing even one aspect of a person’s identity, we serve to silence to their entire voice. And this is the crux of diversity in the workplace.
Standing over the bathroom sink, toothbrush in hand and staring into my own eyes in the mirror in front of me, I remind myself of this constant endeavor toward inclusivity. If I could go back in time and say anything to that younger version of myself with her hands in her lap and conceding pieces of her culture to adult escapism, I would tell her to stand, tall and fearless, and claim the space she deserves in this world. To never let your voice be silenced and to never, ever silence another voice.